Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @03:29PM
from the i-spy-with-my-digital-eye dept.

kkleiner writes "A major government agency is looking to blanket the US with cameras that will never stop their surveillance. But don't worry, privacy pundits, those cameras will be spying on the sky, not civilians. NASA's All-sky Fireball Network is a series of cameras that track meteorites as they enter the atmosphere. With careful triangulation, NASA can not only know where the meteorites will land, they can determine where they came from as well. One of the coolest parts of the All-sky Fireball Network is that it's fully automated. Meteors are detected by a computer which sends images, video clips, and data analysis to William Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. Now you can get the same information as Cooke, too – the All-sky Fireball Network's website publicly records all the data for you to peruse."

You miss my point! I was playing paranoid and mostly grumpy about the expansion of security cameras and hidden cameras "gotcha" stings. There will be little difficulty getting coverage, it's mostly there already, and then there are the little remote control airplanes etc. No NASA needed (and the project does sound cool).

You miss my point! I was playing paranoid and mostly grumpy about the expansion of security cameras and hidden cameras "gotcha" stings. There will be little difficulty getting coverage, it's mostly there already, and then there are the little remote control airplanes etc. No NASA needed (and the project does sound cool).

So smile.:)

The exact name of the law eludes me, but there does exist one of those Internet Laws(tm) that posits that the more extreme and crazy a viewpoint (in this case, that of the paranoids), the more likely an attempt at making a parody or satire of said viewpoint will be indistinguishable from the viewpoint's legitimate views.

Or in other words, the tinfoil hat brigade quite seriously would say that, so the irony was lost and everyone assumes you to be one of them. Better luck next time!

This isn't a concern at all. All you have to do is attach some infrared LED's to your tinfoil hat, and you'll be safe from CCD based cameras along with malicious electromagnetic signals.
But seriously, the 'tech infrastructure' (a bunch of cameras?) needed to watch the whole sky would be completely different than what would be needed to watch the whole country. One camera pointed upwards with a wide angle lens would effectively cover many, many square miles of sky area if all you need to do is make out s

But if you have IR LEDs, you need a power source for them. The use of this creates an electromagnetic signature that could be identifiable through the unique interference pattern of your body and possibly radiated by the foil hat, thus enabling easier tracking from EM sensors monitoring passing objects.

So what happens when hundred of meteorite hunters and wanna be's jump in their cars with in minutes and race to an area all wanting to find it ? Most likely going onto private properties hoping to get lucky looking for a 6ft tall rock and trampling the little pebble into the ground.

Considering the cuts that are being pushed through the House, especially for research of earth/space science stuff like tsunami warnings, I can't help but wonder whether it'll just get defunded in a few months. I hope not. This looks interesting, but no amount of federal funding for scientific research is safe from the politicians right now.

In this economy, the last thing we want to do is cut government funding to anything. Maybe we could wait until unemployment has dropped back down to reasonable levels before we start cutting everything to the bone. Or we could bump the highest tax bracket back up to fifty percent or so, still on the right side of the Laffer curve so government funding goes up, and we could stop worrying about this manufactured debt crisis.

Seriously, who thinks "Hmm, recession, unemployment, you know what will fix this? Fewe

Of course it won't affect hiring. The rich invest all their money overseas, because no one here has any money to buy anything. We had closer to full employment back when the top marginal tax rate was near ninety percent. Wall Street is tipping back the Champagne in celebration of their full recovery, funded by us, meanwhile, Americans are having to choose between food and medicine. Like the group of German millionaires who demanded that the highest tax rate in Germany be raised, I would be happy to pay more

Glad to see you speak for all rich people, and your millions are being squandered and wasted so much that you can just part with them. If I had a few million, I'd probably invest it in my startup. If I were to suddenly lose those millions to fund some retarted half-assed social program, I'd have to let them all go.

My problem is that me and my fiance are knocking on the door of being rich and keep getting dragged back down with ridiculously high taxes (Income, Property, Social Security, Sales, Medicare,

The rich get more from society, they should give more back. They are engaged in class warfare against us, they have taken all the gains in GDP over the last forty years for themselves. All they did was "risk" their money, while workers risked their lives and livelihoods. Workers produce all value in society, yet money-lenders take all the profits. I say we fight back, or we will go back to the gilded age and be nothing more than serfs in our own country.

Take a dollar away from the rich man and use it to actually fund jobs in the US, instead of letting him invest it overseas. If the rich weren't rich, everyone would have money to provide jobs for the less fortunate. You act as though taking a dollar away from the wealthy means the dollar disappears. It doesn't work that way. Most of our resources are owned and controlled by a very small percentage of people, and those people do have more in common with Saudi Arabian sheiks than they do with you or I. The ri

They already took all our wealth, why would they invest in the place they just robbed? People invest money into businesses when those businesses need to expand. We're in a recession. Businesses are laying people off, not hiring more people. And yet, somehow, Wall Street has rebounded back to pre-depression levels. Yet unemployment is still soaring. So what's your explanation?

Take a dollar away from a rich man and he still has millions of dollars to fund a job.

Back when there wasn't a wide gap in salaries, yes raising personal income taxes on business owners could hampered job growth, but today the gap in executive salary vs worker salary is so wide that tax increases on the rich shouldn't impact jobs.

But it still does because the rich have gotten a "mine mine mine" mentality and hoard wealth now.

The highest personal income tax decade in the United States was also the decade of

They do pay more. You may have noticed that our tax rate scales higher as you gain more money. Significantly higher. In the end, though, the middle class feels it the most, as people like you waging your own form of class warfare keep deciding that the barrier to 'rich and evil' needs to get lower and lower.

I can't deal with this kind of argument anymore. The term 'rich' gets thrown around and people like you assume that every single person described by that term is an evil white titan of industry hel

Of course they do, but they should pay far, far more than they do. I have nothing against the rich in general, but I do have something against then owning class ultra wealthy elite that own ninety percent of the wealth in this country. If you aren't an evil white titan, I have no problem with you. But the elites DO want to keep you poor, there's even a term for it "cheap labor conservative." Every single policy of the cheap labor conservative is aimed at making you poor and desperate, so that you will grate

I don't disagree (completely). There is a significant wealth gap. But I disagree that a blanket increase in taxes is any kind of solution under that kind of justification. It's like carpet bombing a city to get at your enemy; you will hurt them, but a lot of others are hurt in the process.

I would be happier to see the barrier to becoming rich lowered; there are a lot of people in the upper-middle class who could become rich should we stop taxing them at nearly a 50% rate (I'm talking total taxes here,

Wealth inequality did not build this country. I'm pretty sure the constitution says nothing about your right to screw over your fellow man in order to accumulate the most wampum. What built this country is the hard work of the poor and middle class, not wealthy investors who never lifted a finger or broke a sweat. The idea that a man will work harder for a billion than for ten million is just absurd. If you aren't working your hardest for that ten million, you hardly deserve a billion. You don't need inequa

Of course you tax where the money is; that's why we have the highest corporate tax rate of any developed nation and all those associated benefits, right? Please. And the fact that you still think point 2) has any meaning indicates your ignorance of the real world. They don't change based on a percentage; they change based on whatever the fuck the legislature decides to write into law. Today it's (a seemingly endless) war. Tomorrow it's (half-assed and poorly implemented) welfare. And when these ventur

Well, if they do manage to do it, I hope they have the sense to coordinate with other sensor net projects -- if they are going to go through all the trouble to site, power, and accurately position a big array of cameras, there's no reason they shouldn't also put at least the cheaper seismic/meteorological instrumentation alongside them.

This could be done as a public/private partnership. If NASA provides the reference designs, server space and software, it could be an interesting project for volunteers all over the world, not only the US. The prices, resolution and quality of optics of regular, off-the-shelf weather resistant digital cameras can make this doable at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking something similar to what you can get today using networked weather stations [wunderground.com] to provide very accurate conditions and forecasting.

I just want to give props to the guy or gal who came up with "All-sky Fireball Network" that name is so full of win I can't stand it. To bad it'll likely be referred to as the ASFN. Maybe we can get scientists to name our legislation packages for us!

In South Jersey they have been installing lots of solar panels on telephone poles, each one about 1/4 square meter or so. They did not count on the fact that telephone poles and wires are a favorite hang out for birds. I've seen some that are totally covered.These cameras will be smaller targets, but the bird problem remains.

"The network currently consists of 3 cameras placed in locations in north Alabama, northwest Georgia, and southern Tennessee. The network is growing all the time, with plans to place a total of 15 cameras..." http://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov/

Only a matter of time before DHS builds stereoscopic aerial drone mirrors to fly over them cameras so they can turn them on the populace and get images in micro HD of everyone for thousands of miles. Given the resolution current optical and digital devices are capable of, it's conceivable this is a kaliedoscopic effort to capture all human activity at once.

This is all just part of their plan to find the stash of freeze dried ice cream I lifted from the Air and Space Museum in 1983. That stuff is still burie

You haven't been following the official DHS and military nervousness about private drones with cameras. This is the perfect way to scan the sky for odd objects. Time to program in a flight path randomizer...

This sounds a lot like my SETINE idea, "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Near Earth" http://www.setine.com/ [setine.com]

For this I was thinking of having 2 camera, wide angle high res still , and a Servo controlled 1080i HD camera with 35x Zoom like they use in high end CCTV systems.

The idea is the one camera would spot objects in the sky that don't follow expected patterns. The second on would zoom in and track it, and record it.These could then be collected on the Internet and use crowd sourcing to ID objec